( none of that is romance. infatuation, maybe, but the reason yuuta knows so much about love at such a young age is because the events of his life have allowed him to soar to its zeniths and plummet into its furrows several times already. ever since he'd unraveled rika's curse, he's had time to think about it — about the time after her death but also before, to the halcyon years they'd spent as one another's mutual shadows, shunned by most of the world but finding a near-perfect solace in one another. to love someone deeply is to open yourself up to so much more. when she had been bound to him as a curse, he had often feared rika, and in his most terrible and desperate moments he had put the blame on her for her reactions instead of on him for necessitating them. when someone knows you so well, when so much of who you are is wrapped up in them and who they are... it's easy to hurt and to get hurt; you know them so well that you know all the things that could wound them, but your words and your actions by the same token have more potent healing ability than even time itself could offer.
it's something he can't expect any of his classmates to understand. he doesn't try to explain it to them. he had never taken the time to tell them that when he had offered everything he was and everything he would ever be to rika, that it had been entirely out of acceptance and out of love — love for his friends, so that he could do what was necessary to save their lives. love for rika, out of gratitude for all that she had done for him and how patient she had been in playing the role of a monster until he could follow through with the promise he'd made to her. and the love that's hardest to explain: that for himself, for deciding that if he was going to shrug out of his mortal coil as he had only narrowly avoided doing, and willingly, before joining jujutsu high, he would do so living as much as he ever had for himself and how he felt in the moment.
see? it's not something one can explain because it's often irrational, often contradictory and capricious, but it is what it is. or, at least, that's how he sees it after months of quiet rumination.
jujutsu sorcerers are accustomed to bidding with all that they have. he'd realized that when he watched toge walk away to face off with the semi-grade 1 curse on his own before yuuta had decided to fight with him — they do so because they know that tomorrow is never guaranteed to them or anyone that they care for, and they fight that much harder to try to actualize it themselves. it's this, combined with his own quiet sort of boldness that had only grown in the last year or so, that allows yuuta to act freely and without concern for judgment or appearances. why should he, or any of them? life is short. far too short for him not to appreciate the smile as it breaks on megumi's face like the sun taking a brief stand in eternally overcast skies, though yuuta also appreciates his calm stoicism for its own merits as well. he wonders why he otherwise holds back. he can sense it in a momentary tenseness that plays out in contradiction on his face, the internal conflict of what's wanted and what's denied. he could have a specific reason — would he tell him if he overstepped?
another soft, warm laugh, another half-step closer. close enough now that megumi might be able to feel the warmth of his breath as he replies, ) Isn't it natural to be a little dangerous sometimes?
( he might know a thing or two about that.
the moment is heavy and precipitous with what yuuta wants to do here — what they both most likely want to do here, but... he's wary of pressing too far. for now he merely lifts both of their hands as they are clasped together and rests them lightly against his chest, over the steady beat of his heart. )
Kugisaki likes to call him an anti-social guy and as much as he gives her grief about it, Megumi can't deny that she's wrong. he was very young when he learned that the last remaining pillar in his parental unit had seen fit to sell him back to a clan they'd never even considered family in the first place. no goodbyes, no explanations. and no check-ins, even after all these years. the loss of his mother was greatly softened by timing; Megumi isn't the type to sit and daydream about whether she smiled when she looked down at her baby in her arms. but being sold, no more useful than a cheap prostitute to a client who only needs his bed warm for a few hours, is a betrayal that cuts deep even when he's not actively thinking about it.
how much, he used to wonder, when he first began summoning his shikigami and taming them, are these all worth?
more than he was. that's for sure.
and it's a belief that, until recently, embedded itself to his core, tying itself to his identity, to every thought and action, until death by way of a divine general felt like the best way to make his cheap life worth more. his one trump card - a flash of brilliant strength before the fade into irrelevance. his shikigami's name would live on longer than his own. the way it should be.
Megumi still feels the distant ache of a familiar fear he's just barely extracted: this is selfish, especially for a guy who's never seen the point of making too much of an effort to get along with people because his end is inevitable. the road ahead is paved in gold for only the strongest. a wretched, lonely road, but one they get to walk regardless. his eyes dip down to the sight of their hands, curled together as if it's a natural thing they've done so many times before.
it is selfish. but his senpai is strong enough to indulge him. ]
I never felt like I could be dangerous before you.
[ it's something of an apology and a request, with the way he says it, eyes intensely earnest for once as he visibly takes a deep breath and leans in, slow - more than enough time for Yuuta to express discomfort or move away. his kiss, in contrast to his certainty, is soft, hesitant - more than indicative of the truth in his words - and chaste. a confession purposely given with a weight as light as a butterfly's wing. ]
( they share more common ground than they might initially expect. over the last year or so, yuuta has learned sociability and affability, but that doesn't necessarily directly translate into openness. polite kindness can be just as personally distancing as purposeful aloofness — the maintenance of that distance is a difficult habit to break, especially when the consequences of a lapse in the last five years might've ended up being a matter of life and death. he had tried to live in his parents' house with rika's ghost haunting him, but he'd barely managed to get through a year before the tension started to rise to a point where it was not only effecting him but also his parents. they might not have been able to see her, but they could sense her; they could sense the heavy and malicious force that seemed to linger in their son's shadow. and they could sense that it was angry — furious with envy — and that it was more and more honing in on yuuta's little sister.
all to a point where the danger of a single lapse in his attention in arbitrating between them and rika could cost far too much. he had left, having to find anywhere else to be that wasn't within a dangerously close proximity to others (and especially those that he cared about).
he could never understand the pain and mental wounds that would be left behind by a parent pawning you as if you were an unwanted family heirloom, but... even as he continued to go to school as consistently as he could manage, they never tried to intercept him. his parents had never tried to bring him home. perhaps they had understood on some level the sacrifice that he had made, for both their safety and his sister's, but...
it still hurt to know that they wouldn't fight to try to keep him as well.
time has passed. regardless of how he'd felt about it a year or so ago, yuuta no longer believes that his continued existence on this planet is a net negative, though getting into the details of that karmic calculation was something he didn't really care to do. there's something about weighing everything that he had put rika in a position to do before being accepted to jujutsu tech against what he's been able to do since arriving there that leaves a bad taste in his mouth. self-affirmation is not an instance but a process, and it's one that he is still working through. so, too, is the performance of vulnerability. the admission of concern, and how dizzying the intimacy of something so small to others might seem after years of self-imposed exile. megumi receives him now having already gone through a lot of those growing pains and having come out the other side feeling far more emboldened by the authenticity of what his heart told him over very nearly everything else.
it had steered him right with rika — why would it lead him astray with his fellow students here, the first who had opened their own hearts to him after the truth of who and what he was had come to light?
it's customary of others to see one's strength far better than they can get a sense of it themselves. yuuta scarcely thinks he needs to bear indulgence for megumi when he knows unerringly that he has the inner steel to state what it is that he wants and reach for it in the same breath. but there is the back-and-forth step of a dance in this that he finds incredibly endearing, etching a warm and fond smile into the curve of his lips at the words and shift forward. yuuta himself remains immovable, dark eyes steady on megumi's face until their lips meet. and then they lid closed.
in a way it's funny to yuuta that some of his first impressions of megumi had been somewhat abrupt, harsh — it couldn't be any further from how he is now, the warmth of his lips feather-light against his own. though sometimes he can succumb to tides of passion just as torrental and unfathomable as his cursed energy, yuuta is almost afraid to break the delicacy of the moment, how it seems to ring in his ears and vibrate in the air. he leaves it like that for just a second, and then he replies in cautious kind, lips molding to megumi's for a beat before separating — not by much, though, but enough that his warm breath of levity blooms in the small space between them. )
You sure about that?
( one of his hands twists, rotating megumi's so that the flat of the back of his hand presses against his chest, so he can better measure the pace of his heart, both strong and steady at a gallop. the physical evidence of his verbal challenge can be much more difficult to argue with. with his other hand he relinquishes megumi's, lifting to the side of his face so that when he resumes their kiss, it is with with that same spirit and self-assuredness. )
[ his reaction to a kiss, as it turns out, is not all that different from a fight. the only real difference is how the nerves and anxiety strike: where a fight might make his heart pound incessantly, and his lungs stretch as widely as they can against his ribcage, Yuuta's lips against his own makes Megumi feel as though his organs might stutter and fail from forgetting how to work properly. it's a powerful thing, deceptive in its simplicity. where he thought he would be satisfied with just one, that thought is easily replaced with an immediate desire for more. more kisses, more time, more of both.
a huff of amusement is all he can manage - and even that's a little choked with endeared disbelief - before their lips are touching once more, the feeling of Yuuta's heartbeat against his hand somehow directly influencing to his own until he can swear they're beating together, at the same pace, like a terribly corny development in a drama.
but this green light is all he needs. that, and the calloused hand against his cheek that he already wants to lean into, to give Yuuta all the warmth he deserves. ]
I'm sure.
[ there's no time to be embarrassed by the way his voice has somehow softened and deepened simultaneously, not when his lips are moving, growing in confidence as they glide - clumsy in some ways, like catching where they're both too dry but details like that fade away in the overwhelming growth of his enthusiasm. almost enough to be puppy-like, now that he feels safe enough to unleash his feelings.
but he's still Fushiguro Megumi, with a self-preservation instinct that stretches longer than the sun's distance from the earth, and he doesn't allow his desires to run rampant for too long. (rampant, in this case, is what others would probably still consider reserved.) when he's mustered up enough strength to pull back slowly and gracefully, he does. and probably looks entirely too solemn when he squeezes Yuuta's hand to remind himself this isn't a dream. ]
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🤭
it's something he can't expect any of his classmates to understand. he doesn't try to explain it to them. he had never taken the time to tell them that when he had offered everything he was and everything he would ever be to rika, that it had been entirely out of acceptance and out of love — love for his friends, so that he could do what was necessary to save their lives. love for rika, out of gratitude for all that she had done for him and how patient she had been in playing the role of a monster until he could follow through with the promise he'd made to her. and the love that's hardest to explain: that for himself, for deciding that if he was going to shrug out of his mortal coil as he had only narrowly avoided doing, and willingly, before joining jujutsu high, he would do so living as much as he ever had for himself and how he felt in the moment.
see? it's not something one can explain because it's often irrational, often contradictory and capricious, but it is what it is. or, at least, that's how he sees it after months of quiet rumination.
jujutsu sorcerers are accustomed to bidding with all that they have. he'd realized that when he watched toge walk away to face off with the semi-grade 1 curse on his own before yuuta had decided to fight with him — they do so because they know that tomorrow is never guaranteed to them or anyone that they care for, and they fight that much harder to try to actualize it themselves. it's this, combined with his own quiet sort of boldness that had only grown in the last year or so, that allows yuuta to act freely and without concern for judgment or appearances. why should he, or any of them? life is short. far too short for him not to appreciate the smile as it breaks on megumi's face like the sun taking a brief stand in eternally overcast skies, though yuuta also appreciates his calm stoicism for its own merits as well. he wonders why he otherwise holds back. he can sense it in a momentary tenseness that plays out in contradiction on his face, the internal conflict of what's wanted and what's denied. he could have a specific reason — would he tell him if he overstepped?
another soft, warm laugh, another half-step closer. close enough now that megumi might be able to feel the warmth of his breath as he replies, ) Isn't it natural to be a little dangerous sometimes?
( he might know a thing or two about that.
the moment is heavy and precipitous with what yuuta wants to do here — what they both most likely want to do here, but... he's wary of pressing too far. for now he merely lifts both of their hands as they are clasped together and rests them lightly against his chest, over the steady beat of his heart. )
no subject
Kugisaki likes to call him an anti-social guy and as much as he gives her grief about it, Megumi can't deny that she's wrong. he was very young when he learned that the last remaining pillar in his parental unit had seen fit to sell him back to a clan they'd never even considered family in the first place. no goodbyes, no explanations. and no check-ins, even after all these years. the loss of his mother was greatly softened by timing; Megumi isn't the type to sit and daydream about whether she smiled when she looked down at her baby in her arms. but being sold, no more useful than a cheap prostitute to a client who only needs his bed warm for a few hours, is a betrayal that cuts deep even when he's not actively thinking about it.
how much, he used to wonder, when he first began summoning his shikigami and taming them, are these all worth?
more than he was. that's for sure.
and it's a belief that, until recently, embedded itself to his core, tying itself to his identity, to every thought and action, until death by way of a divine general felt like the best way to make his cheap life worth more. his one trump card - a flash of brilliant strength before the fade into irrelevance. his shikigami's name would live on longer than his own. the way it should be.
Megumi still feels the distant ache of a familiar fear he's just barely extracted: this is selfish, especially for a guy who's never seen the point of making too much of an effort to get along with people because his end is inevitable. the road ahead is paved in gold for only the strongest. a wretched, lonely road, but one they get to walk regardless. his eyes dip down to the sight of their hands, curled together as if it's a natural thing they've done so many times before.
it is selfish. but his senpai is strong enough to indulge him. ]
I never felt like I could be dangerous before you.
[ it's something of an apology and a request, with the way he says it, eyes intensely earnest for once as he visibly takes a deep breath and leans in, slow - more than enough time for Yuuta to express discomfort or move away. his kiss, in contrast to his certainty, is soft, hesitant - more than indicative of the truth in his words - and chaste. a confession purposely given with a weight as light as a butterfly's wing. ]
no subject
all to a point where the danger of a single lapse in his attention in arbitrating between them and rika could cost far too much. he had left, having to find anywhere else to be that wasn't within a dangerously close proximity to others (and especially those that he cared about).
he could never understand the pain and mental wounds that would be left behind by a parent pawning you as if you were an unwanted family heirloom, but... even as he continued to go to school as consistently as he could manage, they never tried to intercept him. his parents had never tried to bring him home. perhaps they had understood on some level the sacrifice that he had made, for both their safety and his sister's, but...
it still hurt to know that they wouldn't fight to try to keep him as well.
time has passed. regardless of how he'd felt about it a year or so ago, yuuta no longer believes that his continued existence on this planet is a net negative, though getting into the details of that karmic calculation was something he didn't really care to do. there's something about weighing everything that he had put rika in a position to do before being accepted to jujutsu tech against what he's been able to do since arriving there that leaves a bad taste in his mouth. self-affirmation is not an instance but a process, and it's one that he is still working through. so, too, is the performance of vulnerability. the admission of concern, and how dizzying the intimacy of something so small to others might seem after years of self-imposed exile. megumi receives him now having already gone through a lot of those growing pains and having come out the other side feeling far more emboldened by the authenticity of what his heart told him over very nearly everything else.
it had steered him right with rika — why would it lead him astray with his fellow students here, the first who had opened their own hearts to him after the truth of who and what he was had come to light?
it's customary of others to see one's strength far better than they can get a sense of it themselves. yuuta scarcely thinks he needs to bear indulgence for megumi when he knows unerringly that he has the inner steel to state what it is that he wants and reach for it in the same breath. but there is the back-and-forth step of a dance in this that he finds incredibly endearing, etching a warm and fond smile into the curve of his lips at the words and shift forward. yuuta himself remains immovable, dark eyes steady on megumi's face until their lips meet. and then they lid closed.
in a way it's funny to yuuta that some of his first impressions of megumi had been somewhat abrupt, harsh — it couldn't be any further from how he is now, the warmth of his lips feather-light against his own. though sometimes he can succumb to tides of passion just as torrental and unfathomable as his cursed energy, yuuta is almost afraid to break the delicacy of the moment, how it seems to ring in his ears and vibrate in the air. he leaves it like that for just a second, and then he replies in cautious kind, lips molding to megumi's for a beat before separating — not by much, though, but enough that his warm breath of levity blooms in the small space between them. )
You sure about that?
( one of his hands twists, rotating megumi's so that the flat of the back of his hand presses against his chest, so he can better measure the pace of his heart, both strong and steady at a gallop. the physical evidence of his verbal challenge can be much more difficult to argue with. with his other hand he relinquishes megumi's, lifting to the side of his face so that when he resumes their kiss, it is with with that same spirit and self-assuredness. )
no subject
a huff of amusement is all he can manage - and even that's a little choked with endeared disbelief - before their lips are touching once more, the feeling of Yuuta's heartbeat against his hand somehow directly influencing to his own until he can swear they're beating together, at the same pace, like a terribly corny development in a drama.
but this green light is all he needs. that, and the calloused hand against his cheek that he already wants to lean into, to give Yuuta all the warmth he deserves. ]
I'm sure.
[ there's no time to be embarrassed by the way his voice has somehow softened and deepened simultaneously, not when his lips are moving, growing in confidence as they glide - clumsy in some ways, like catching where they're both too dry but details like that fade away in the overwhelming growth of his enthusiasm. almost enough to be puppy-like, now that he feels safe enough to unleash his feelings.
but he's still Fushiguro Megumi, with a self-preservation instinct that stretches longer than the sun's distance from the earth, and he doesn't allow his desires to run rampant for too long. (rampant, in this case, is what others would probably still consider reserved.) when he's mustered up enough strength to pull back slowly and gracefully, he does. and probably looks entirely too solemn when he squeezes Yuuta's hand to remind himself this isn't a dream. ]
Senpai. You know how I feel now, right?